How Berlin Became the World’s Coolest Capital City

In 1987, Berlin was a divided city, cleaved in two by a concrete wall and treated like a political pawn in the Cold War freeze separating Western capitalism from Eastern communism.

While Americans watched as President Reagan stood by the Brandenburg Gate that June and demanded, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” stories of Berlin’s industrial techno temples, bohemian squats, and sweat-driven, all-night raves had already helped to put the city on the map for hedonists everywhere.

Thirty years later, the German capital has leveraged its legendary climate of cultural experimentation, DIY creativity, and free-wheeling spirit born from repression to become one of the most achingly hip places on the planet. Even as it’s catapulted to the center of European power and faced growing gentrification woes, Berlin remains a dynamic cultural trendsetter—a place whose live-and-let-live ethos has lured artists, activists, and visitors since Berliners swarmed the Wall with sledgehammers in 1989. The numbers don’t lie: In 2015, Berlin surpassed Rome to become Europe’s third-most-visited city, behind London and Paris. Last year, it welcomed a record 12.7 million visitors—more than 3.5 times its population, six times the number that visited West Berlin in 1987, and 4.5 times the number that visited the city in 1990 following reunification.

The fall of the Wall was the best marketing event to ever happen to Berlin.

“The fall of the Wall was the best marketing event to ever happen to Berlin,” says Dimitri Hegemann, an activist, organizer, and towering figure in the city’s techno scene, who helped plant the seeds of Berlin’s near-mythical club culture. “The whole world saw young people high on freedom dancing wildly in the street to electronic music. Berlin became a model for the world: If you give young people space to play, anything is possible.”

Following reunification, the new Berlin’s boundless space and cheap rent fostered a flurry of artistic improvisation in both the East and West. Former squats transformed into hole-in-the-wall galleries, artists opened studios in abandoned GDR warehouses, and an explosion of graffiti and murals began popping up on Berlin’s concrete canvases. This spirit of creative entrepreneurship has stuck, and today, Berlin has one of the most progressive and exciting art scenes on earth: The city is home to 170 museums, more than New York (131), and anywhere in Europe besides London (250). Ironically, a 0.8-mile stretch of the Wall that once divided the city is now one of Berlin’s most visited landmarks: the East Side Gallery, the world’s largest and longest open-air gallery. In September, the city will open the Museum for Urban Contemporary Art, the world’s first museum dedicated exclusively to street art, in buzzing Schöneberg—the same nabe where David Bowie and Iggy Pop once shared an apartment.

Berlin was named a UNESCO City of Design in 2006.

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Reunification also presented Berlin with the challenge of forging the divided city back together again, and redefining itself architecturally. New buildings from some of the world’s leading architects—including I.M. Pei, Renzo Piano, David Chipperfield, and Sir Norman Foster—have created a virtual laboratory of engineering experimentation, and led Berlin to be named a UNESCO City of Design in 2006. The city’s structural marvels also draw huge crowds: The Reichstag Dome, Jüdisches Museum, Sony Center, and Neues Museum (all built after 1990) are among Berlin’s most-visited buildings and monuments. After nearly 30 years of reunification, the work still isn’t done. Today, huge gashes of empty space where the Wall once stood are filled with a ballet of cranes creating towering glass buildings alongside the city’s grand pre-WWII Altbau palaces and concrete-slab Soviet-era mass housing projects.

The city’s ever-changing cultural landscape has also seeped into the kitchen. Three decades ago, East Berliners could only purchase Western food at government-approved retail stores. West Berlin’s dining scene gravitated between local street food staples of currywurst and pork knuckle with sauerkraut, or higher-end restaurants that looked to imitate fine French dining.

“In the 1980s, there was a lack of a restaurant scene here because the city was an island surrounded by East Germany, and every single item had to be delivered from West Germany,” says Tim Raue, a native of Berlin’s gritty-turned-trendy Kreuzberg neighborhood and whose Asian-inspired, two-Michelin-starred Restaurant Tim Raue has inspired a new generation of Berlin chefs. “The highest level of food was more or less working-class dishes served in pubs. Because Berlin was poor and down, it was possible to create a completely new dining scene.”

Visit Berlin today and you’ll find a melting pot of Italian, Vietnamese, Turkish, and German traditions that is quickly catching up to the caliber of other European capitals. The city now has 18 Michelin-starred restaurants, more doner kebab shops than in Istanbul, locavore-leaning indoor market halls that ooze Brooklyn cool, and one of Germany’s most enticing culinary gems: Thai Park, a congregation of hundreds of Thai vendors making food from scratch in Berlin’s Wilmersdorf neighborhood.

From Soviet stronghold to libertine bastion, Berlin’s recipe of grit and glamour has been luring travelers for decades. And as it reinvents itself once more, it’s bound to remain a city that’s always becoming, never being.